Newly crowned EY Industry Entrepreneur of the Year Stephen Vernon was a guest speaker at the Society of Chartered Surveyors Conference in Croke Park this week.

Newstalk's Shane Coleman interviewed Vernon for about 30 minutes, on the state of the market, and on how the English-born son of a Dundalk man left his solid job in London for the giddy life of Irish property investing.

He notably steered Green Property through the crash with rare skill and, at the time even rarer, good humour.

Asked about the worrying prospects now of Donald Trump's victory and Brexit, he moved to calm the audience's collective nerves. The economic storm clouds may be gathering, but there is always a silver lining - in this case it might speed up the return of the Troika to Ireland, he joked. We think.

Trumping the markets

Speaking of silver linings, the Irish Stock Exchange clocked up the best performance in the developed world this week, surging well over 5pc.

Solid Ryanair results helped, but Irish entrepreneurship and ingenuity only count for so much.

The rally was all down to one person - tangerine dream turned US president-elect Donald Trump.

His plan to build a wall between the US and Mexico (and generally ramp up spending on roads and bridges) drove the world-beating Iseq rally. That is as unlikely a sentence as the Punt has ever written, but Plan Trump lifted Irish cement-maker CRH shares so much they carried the whole index with them.